The Psychology Behind Information Dashboards

The Psychology Behind Information Dashboards

With data-driven decisions gradually becoming the norm in every industry, the information dashboard has an important role.

With its interactive and intuitive interface and its ability to visualize data in a single screen, it’s becoming a critical tool in the hands of the business user. Moreover, the information dashboard is also making its way into apps used by laypeople for managing day-to-day activities like budget tracking and fitness management.

So what makes information dashboards so appealing to the human mind? What is it that the human mind seeks that is so nicely provided by information dashboards?

Desire to Control

We love to be in control. Imagine a situation where you are unaware of what’s happening around you. Very soon your panic button is switched on and you want to know what’s going on and what you can control.

From an evolutionary standpoint, if we are in control of our environment we have a better chance of survival. Our subconscious mind prepares us for all kinds of danger (fight or flight) based on our perceived level of control.

An information dashboard gives you that control. Whether it’s a personal finance dashboard that makes you conscious of you spending trends or an enterprise marketing dashboard that helps you keep track of your marketing budgets, both heighten your awareness of a situation, giving you the sense of control you crave.

Short Short Term Memory

In his article “Short-Term Memory and Web Usability,” Jakob Nielsen points out that the human mind can’t store much information in short term memory and that this is especially true when they are bombarded with multiple abstract or unusual pieces of data in rapid succession. He cites research that suggests our short-term memory holds only about seven chunks of information, and that these fade from our brain in about 20 seconds.

Dashboards work by overcoming this limitation of short-term memory. By displaying all relevant information on a single screen within a user’s eye span, they reduce the dependence on the short term memory. You don’t have to remember anything because it’s all there in front of your eyes.

Ease of Use

Keep it simple, stupid! This principle works as much in business as it does in real life.

Let’s consider an inventory management system. Using pen and paper, it would take several hours to maintain up-to-date records of incoming and outgoing orders (not to mention the running around involved doing so), with today’s digital dashboards this time can be drastically cut.

Stitch Labs is one such inventory management dashboard that lets merchants monitor their inventory across multiple sales channels.

Also, with responsive designs becoming the norm in the digital industry, these dashboards will gradually become device agnostic, giving users access to the information from their desktops and laptops as well as a plethora of mobile devices.

Conclusion

Any product that has an information dashboard as one of its key offerings should keep the psychological needs of its end users in mind. Users like being in control, they have a limited short-term memory, and they love things that are simple. These three factors should form the foundation of all dashboard designs. Understand your user’s requirements and add in your design best practices and you have the ingredients for creating the perfect information dashboard.

Comments

I think one additional aspect of the "desire to control" motivation for dashboards is our fear of NOT knowing something. A dashboard gives us the sense that we see the whole picture. If we have a whole worldview it's like having eyes on the back of our head and x-ray vision through the trees around us. Nothing will jump out at us from the bushes, or surprise us from behind. Very calming and reassuring to have that omniscient dashboard feeling.

Excelent article Shilpi!. During the last 3 years we are working on strategic dashboards and your comments are very pleasant for our work. It confirm in an easy language of the way the information must be revealed and showed to the reader. The big tip is "How to make the things easier to understand". Many designers and engineers try to make complex systems displaying information too complicated, but it is the wrong way. Making the info easy to read is the big challenge .

Yawn...Such a bland article. Can't believe UX magazine publishes such articles which has nothing new designers know about. Or wait, maybe this is meant for someone who wants to start career as a designer.

Being a user experience professional, I quite often get assignments for enterprise dashboard applications. This article would certainly be helpful for me. However, I have a different, and yet a vague opinion on 'Users want to be in control'. I assume that 'We love to be in control' means that users do not want to feel inundated with data and getting lost in the large pool of information . Nonetheless, it also made me think about 'users desired control over system'. As I believe, users don't prefer to be in control of the system/application.
For instance, the user feels comfortable when user is allowed to view some more details about the application/site/products without logging in. Whereas, many cart-abandonment and site-abandonment happen if it requires a detailed signup/log-in process. Here user feels in the control of the system which is unwanted. Any kind of restriction directly imposed by the system on users in any of her activities is undesirable.
So, in most of the cases either the user wants the system to be in control, or the user prefers to be in a seamless control, which in any case should not take the form of restriction.
Your inputs on this will help clarify my views.

Thanks very much Shilpi! It is always so amazing reading fascinating articles like this as Psychology and behavioral science in general is my passion. My bachelor's was in Sociology-Psychology and I am more and more into the human aspect of IT and never taken a computer course in college.

Hi Jenine,
Thank you. Glad to know it helped. Are you working on some specific dashboard project currently? Let me know if you want me to write on some specific topic regarding an information dashboard...would be glad to help further.

Wow. Excellent article. I've stumbled upon this at a time when I've been tasked with creating a dashboard for an EMR software. This is such an insightful post and I'm particularly grateful to have come across this. Thank you Shilpi.

Informative, well-written and easy to read while having a fairly detailed presentation. I like it!

I would add that psychology can also guide our design of the colors and fonts used in our dashboard pages. For instance, we know from color theories that using red on a financial dashboard should really only be when dire thresholds have been met... and never used in aesthetical design. As well, one would never use harder to read or festive fonts in a network management dashboard.

Really enjoyed the article. I think dashboards will receive greater attention and more deliberate development in 2014. I've seen a number of ventures where the dashboard is really the key value proposition.

Thanks Dan. Glad you enjoyed the article.
Very true...with businesses shifting to data-driven decisions, more and more ISVs would look to embed dashboards in their products to enhance its overall user experience and provide data-driven insights to users.